


not your garden variety demon lord

by rizahawkaye



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Demon/Human Relationships, F/M, Falling In Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:28:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26665204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: “I do not think of you as serving me,” he said. “I do not even think of you as Rin’s caretaker.” It occurred to Sango that most people had probably never heard Lord Sesshomaru say what he was thinking. Most people had probably never heard him speak at all. Yet she was in his hands, his words spilling into the air around them. The astounding clarity of them.“You will remember that,” he told her. Then he let her go.
Relationships: Sango & Rin, Sango/Sesshomaru, Sango/Sesshoumaru (InuYasha), sessan
Comments: 17
Kudos: 54





	not your garden variety demon lord

**Author's Note:**

> a bunch of my sessan headcanons in one fic. 
> 
> ive always kind of liked the idea of sesshomaru/sango. i love mirsan too, but there's something so intriguing about sesshomaru falling for sango, someone who is not only a woman but a demon slayer, and someone who tried to kill someone very important to him. the premise of this is that sango took rin in as a sort of apology after they killed naraku. over time, each side softened to the other (sesshomaru to sango and sango to sesshomaru), and what started as a way to dispel sango's guilt turned into genuine love for rin, which sesshomaru took note of.
> 
> anyway, this was really fun to write and ive got a part 2 coming

It started with a neatly folded kimono. The _obi_ a pale blue, the rest a dazzling array of coral pink and various shades of lavender. Sango pointed to it lying in a tight heap on the bottom step of her humble straw-roof house. 

“Rin- _chan_ , is this for you?”

Rin, a girl who looked to Sango to have grown in a tube, all long limbs and long neck and pointy elbows, inspected the kimono and shook her head, thin fingers parting the fabric, swaying over it like tree branches. She had her bangs tied back away from her face, the rest of her hair falling over the curve of her back, touching the very ends of her vertebrae. “Lord Sesshomaru left mine with Kohaku- _kun_. He gave it to me this morning. Besides, I’m not sure this one would fit me.”

Sango doubted that. Rin was eye level with her shoulder now. It was strange how that happened, the growth, like one morning you’ve murdered an evil half-demon and the next morning you had an eight-year-old and the morning after that the eight-year-old was eleven, and tall, and she could almost see the danger coming from over your shoulder before you did. 

Rin turned her face up to Sango. Young, pretty, wiry Rin. “He left this one for you, Lady Sango.”

**

Sango wore the kimono the following day. Modeled it for Kagome. She was afraid the colors would bring her too much attention, that the lavender would clash with her hair or eyeshadow, but she looked fine, pretty, even. Kagome’s mirror revealed a girl of nineteen, her hair braided over her shoulder, her kimono hugging her wide hips and thighs. Her eyes roved over her own reflection. Kagome cooed at her from the other end of the room, putting her hands together under her chin and tilting her head to one side. 

“You look amazing, Sango.” 

Sango flushed pink. Not from Kagome’s compliments, but because she imagined Lord Sesshomaru picking this kimono out for her. Perhaps he commissioned it with these lavenders in mind. Did he think of her, then? Regularly, even? She tried to envision him wandering the countryside, thoughts of her cluttering his brain, muddying his vision. It was absurd, almost, but she was standing in a kimono he had bought for her. 

“Did he leave a note with it?” asked Kagome. 

“No,” said Sango. She touched the soft silk. Nothing she has owned in her life has ever been so extravagant. It was hard to think of a situation in which wearing the kimono would be appropriate. “I wish that he had.”

Kagome crossed the room to tie Sango’s _obi_. 

“You should tell him so,” she said. 

**

Lord Sesshomaru caught sight of her the next time he flew over. Even from so far away, Sango could tell his glance was questioning, probing. Was he looking for the kimono, she wondered? 

He went to Inuyasha’s home first. Probably to share his findings from his travels or to instigate. He came to her next, his step making little to no sound. Sango was trained, though, and she heard him. “Rin is with Kohaku- _kun_ ,” she said. “I believe they went fishing by the—” 

“I’ve already been to see them,” he said. He cut her off in his perfect, austere tone. The sunlight gilded his frame, sending shockwaves of heat into Sango’s belly. She felt herself begin to flush again, like she had when she was younger, less wise, in love with the idea of intimacy, with the prospect of fulfilling the place of her people and her father, and what giving herself to the cutting heat of a man’s desirability could mean. Sesshomaru had been to see them already — to see Rin — and yet he still came to Sango. The kimono was a mistake, then, and he has come to ask for it to be returned. Sango knelt to place her basket of berries and herbs at her feet, to go and fetch what was rightfully not hers. Rin in the kimono was the proper choice, of course. She would look lovely. It would not clash. 

“Did you receive it?” 

Sango stopped midway to her full height. He was looking at her, studying her face, watching the confusion morph into disbelief and embarrassment and then, finally, a kind of off-kilter relief.

“It was for you,” he said. 

Sango sat crouched at the ground, bearing down on her haunches. The thought to move hadn’t yet occurred to her and she was transfixed by the light, and by him, and the soft glow of the sun against his sunflower eyes. 

There was no scowl on his face, she noted. No hint of his immutable displeasure.

“I can commission you another if that one was not satisfactory.”

Sango shoved herself up from the ground. “It’s a lovely gift, Lord Sesshomaru,” she said, hands out, palms facing him, “but I do so much work in the fields and slaying demons that I’m afraid I haven’t found the occasion to wear it yet.” Except to model it for Kagome, but she hadn’t felt like telling Sesshomaru that. 

“I see,” he said, and frowned. “I’ve brought you something different this time.” He pulled from the folds of his _hankimono_ a small shell, no bigger than the full of Sango’s palm, and the color of coral. He placed the shell into her hand and curled her fingers over it. “Rin tells me she likes her place with you and your brother,” he said. “Thank you.”

He turned from her and leapt back into the sky. 

**

“What is it?” Kagome took it carefully between her fingers. She attempted to open it but it wouldn’t budge, tight as a monk’s seal. “A seashell?”

“An artificially colored one, yes,” said Sango. “I haven’t been able to open it yet.” She took it back from Kagome, in a gentle manner, like she had asked for it without moving her mouth. Kagome gave it away willingly. 

“He gives you pretty gifts but gives me an earful,” said Inuyasha. He was lying beside the fire, on his side, the heel of his hand planted into his cheek. Sango, this scene, all caught up in nostalgia and the lingering feeling of muted evil at her back, barely contained, the firelight parting their faces into streaks of writhing yellow and black slithers of shadow. Talking over their next move. Lamenting the day’s loss. Kagome’s fingers, tiny tethers, fit into the tunnels of bone over Sango’s hand. Grounded her in reality. Brought her back to the humidity and the seashell clutched in her hand. To Inuyasha’s stone-on-stone rasp. “I feed his kid and he still finds reasons to beat me over the head.”

“Sango feeds his kid,” said Kagome, and their fingers were intertwined now, “and you sometimes join them for dinner.”

Inuyasha, having nothing to retort, rolled onto his back. 

Sango thumbed the shell’s opening. She played with slipping her fingernail into it, attempting to pry it open, to see what was inside. It was a colored shell, not quite natural, and so it could have been another commission from Lord Sesshomaru. The thought that he had taken the time not once but twice to choose a gift for Sango was not an unpleasant one. Though it took her into unknown territory, as unknown as any of her predicaments were since the death of the slayers.

“Could this be some demon courting practice?” asked Miroku. He was halfway between Inuyasha and Shippo. Leaning on his staff, cheek bisected by it. 

“Sesshomaru would sooner kill Sango than court her.”

“Inuyasha!”

“I don’t think a demon like Lord Sesshomaru would court a human woman,” said Shippo. “Especially not by giving her presents. If he wanted something, he would probably just take it.”

Sango’s ears went hot.

“Shippo!”

“How unsettling,” said Miroku. 

“Oh,” said Inuyasha, coming back over to his side, “shut up you freaky monk!”

**

Sango asked about the seashell the next time Lord Sesshomaru visited. The time he spent in the village began increasing in increments of minutes then hours, by the weeks and the months. In the beginning, he would spend the early mornings with Rin _,_ listening to her recant her life since she last saw him, watching her perform slayer maneuvers, spar with Kohaku, win and lose, and then he would brush by Sango in the afternoons, saying goodbye to her in curt nods and sideways glances. She asked him to stay a little longer each time, until the days stretched long enough that the sun started to touch the hills and drop in on them, lighting the sky in watercolor oranges and pinks. Sesshomaru was quiet in the hours he spent with her. Contemplative, almost, like he was reading text in another language. Reading her. Sango said his name once and he blinked, steady, but like she had broken him from a trance. 

“The seashell,” she said one evening. “I’m afraid to open it or else it might break.” He brought her demon bones this time, and they were wrapped in leather beside the hearth. Ash frothed up the side of the near-black leather, spraying over it like ocean foam. “For your demon slaying,” he said. Sango looked over at the bundle now, the white bone peeking out from the ends of the leather, which he knew she would have a use for too and had gone through the trouble to procure. 

Lord Sesshomaru took her hand in his, starting her heart in a flutter, and plucked the shell from her grip. “It’s a decoration,” he said, and smiled halfway, and Sango thought her knees would give out. “A good luck charm, supposedly made from the bones of an old vessel of Bishamonten’s.” 

“The God of war and battles?”

“You are a warrior and so I thought it appropriate.”

Sango laughed despite herself. “You’ve brought me a trinket.” Lord Sesshomaru moved to hold her wrist and brought her forward, so close she had to crane her neck back to see him, so close she could feel the heat of him gathering there in the space between them. Collecting itself there. 

“You’ve brought me peace of mind,” he said. He let her go, his face betraying affection, almost, or something… else entirely. When did they get here? How did they get here? He flew over them often now, landing in her yard or in her fields and standing there, silent, still, watching. He walked through the village with her as she distributed her herbs and medicines and salves. He, a constant presence, when he was here, when he chose to be here, and she, a human, someone who had almost killed his daughter. 

His daughter, a bridge between them. A living connection. A red string of fate. Sango tasted the hearth’s ash on her tongue, the foamy swath of it, and this must be what shame tasted like. Or disappointment. Or the mixture of both, better to be discarded than anything else, that concoction which would swirl around in your gut and have you uncertain of your very self. After a while, you might forget what it felt like to live a life without it. You will look at other people and be envious of their blithe existence even knowing that you had once held that position in life. That fusion of discontentment might make you doubt your own motivations. And the daughter which you house and feed and love every lanky inch of might become his daughter, never being yours, because that relationship you’ve cultivated will have been born of a distasteful brew. Undeserving. 

Sango washed her tongue with words. 

“I’m not sure I ever properly apologized to you, Lord Sesshomaru,” said Sango. “I almost killed Rin- _chan_ and I,” she swallowed, kept her eyes on her feet, “I was misguided, and I was desperate, and while the love which fueled me has faded I know that yours has not. It was selfish, my Lord, and my taking care of Rin- _chan_ now is not meant to be penance. Not anymore. I care for Rin- _chan_ , truly, as her own person, and I am not doing you favors, my Lord. I am sorry for what I almost did but I love Rin- _chan_ on her own merits and not because of my guilt.” 

Sango thought, maybe, that confessing this might absolve her. That, perhaps, the gifts would stop, the confusion, the sunsets, all of it would end. He would go back to being a demon who hated her and she would go back to being a human who feared him. There would be no more transactions made in kimonos and seashells and leather-bound demon bones. She looked up at him and away from her toes, and his eyes were hard, darkened, molten. His fingers found her face in one fluid motion, and he was careful, through the anger, if that’s what it was, not to grab too hard. 

“I do not think of you as serving me,” he said. “I do not even think of you as Rin’s caretaker.” It occurred to Sango that most people had probably never heard Lord Sesshomaru say what he was thinking. Most people had probably never heard him speak at all. Yet she was in his hands, his words spilling into the air around them. The astounding clarity of them.

“You will remember that,” he told her. Then he let her go. 

He let her go. 

**

Lord Sesshomaru returned at the next new moon covered in blood, the white of his _hankimono_ stained red, the whites of his eyes stained red, his hands stained red, red, red. He stumbled into Sango’s home heaving in great big breaths. He woke her from the sound of them, his breaths, aching through the room. Sango caught the smell of gunpowder, still so unfamiliar to her, and iron, as familiar as her own face. She was on her knees in front of him in seconds, using the length of her arms to prop him up. He stared down at her, blood trickling from a corner of his mouth. Blood caught on his canines. 

“Lady Sango,” he said, and it was the first time he ever said her name to her. Her heart got caught up in itself. “I—” He slumped forward then. He was a lean man, but dense, and Sango grunted as she took on the weight of him. He was no heavier than _hiraikotsu_ , really, and she laid him down on her bedding, bracing his head with her hand. 

This was the first time she had ever looked down at him. It was always his eyes cast downward, below the shadows of his lashes, watching. 

Sango didn’t know what to do for far too many seconds. They stretched on and on. She pushed the hair out of his face and that was when she noticed the blood on her wrist, her forearm, crusting over. Water would be helpful, she thought, and so she took the pail of it she kept at her bedside and dipped her sleeve in. One of her hands was resting, fingers splayed, over the expanse of Sesshomaru’s chest. She wanted to count his breaths. To know with certainty that they were coming. Her other hand worked at the blood on his face, neck, the corner of his mouth. It took time, but eventually she saw his birthmarks again, and leaned back into the dark quiet. 

It would be half an hour still before Sango gathered the courage to pull Sesshomaru’s _hankimono_ down low enough to find the source of the blood. 

Lord Sesshomaru woke in the morning and raised himself from the bed as though pulling himself from honey. Sweat glistened over his jaw, his high cheekbones. His eyes were watery and glazed. He did not say anything except her name, again, like a prayer, like a mantra, and his hand swept the hair from her nape, making room to cup her face. 

He kissed her with his eyes closed, mouth parted, breathing her in. Chaste, so soft. 

Lord Sesshomaru anchored her in. He curled her into the long arch of his body. She fit her fists against his bare chest, his _hankimono_ soaking in cold water in a tub to her right, bloodied bandages and cloth piled in the corner of the room. The heat he gave off was strong like a fire, but calmer, tamed. It crept into her at a leisure pace, starting in her knuckles and working its way up her arms and into her chest, where it bloomed. Were all demons so warm?

He parted her mouth with his, incessant, begging for entry. His tongue brought more heat. Sango was already breathing in pants, her hands migrating from his chest to his face, her fingers resting in the spaces between his birthmarks. She wanted him in, closer, warmer, further. He was harder to control than she was and so he commanded the duet, kissing her at his pace, hand traveling in a slow glide from her face to her lower back, where he gripped her hard.

“Ah—” she whimpered into the side of his mouth. He retreated then and she nearly asked, pleading, that he didn't. 

“I apologize if I have overstepped,” he said. Eyes opened. He brushed her bangs from her face as his heat fell away with him to the bed.

Sango couldn’t say anything. She could only mourn what she had lost. 

Lord Sesshomaru had that look on his face again. His eyes, earnest, like looking through pools of clear, clean water, but his brows tight. Questioning. Himself or her, she was not sure. 

“You should sleep,” he said. 

“I don’t want to sleep,” she said. “I want—” The words barreled out of her. She was tired, no doubt, but the need to be wrapped up in his warmth overwhelmed her. Now that she’s had a taste of it, of him, she could no longer imagine what life had been like before. 

Lord Sesshomaru did not sit up again. He offered Sango a choice, motioned for her with his hand, wrapping his fingers around her forearm and urging her onto his torso. 

“Won’t I hurt you?” she asked him, fully conscious of the wounds set deep in his side. Whatever had gotten him had torn him apart badly, and she managed to close the wounds with a temporary fix, some herbs from her garden, but she suspected he would need proper care from Lady Kaede.

“Demons are not so fragile,” he said. Sango settled over him, her cheeks warming, her heart thumping in her throat, wrists. The lingering moonlight twisted with the sun in Lord Sesshomaru’s eyes, lighting them up. He dug his nails into her thigh and spread her legs apart. “Have you laid with a demon before?” 

It took quite a lot of willpower for Sango to respond. Her mind was crowded with images of him, with the press of his fingers, with the way his palm was pushing her sleepwear up, up into the crease of her groin. “I, uh—” she began. His thumb found the bud of nerves at her center, brushed it, sent lightning rocketing through her. She gasped, despite herself — despite this not being her first time to lay with a man. “Ah, no,” she said, and she was shivering. “Not a demon, my Lord.”

Lord Sesshomaru hummed. “This will be my first time,” he said, “with a human woman.”

Sango heard the stories over and over as she grew up in her demon slayer village. Cautionary tales. The women who were enraptured by the beauty of demons, and the demons who found human women to bear them children, or to satiate their primal desires. Human women could be easy targets, it seemed, as demons were quite adept at charming them. Sango’s father used to warn her, repeatedly, moreso as she came of age, about the wiles of demons and their ulterior motives and what, exactly, life was like for women who mothered half-demons. Whatever Sesshomaru’s intentions were — whether they be pure or not — were not more important to Sango than the way he was watching her as he worked her in measured circles, his fingers teasing her entrance, waiting for her to get wet, his expression shifting, going dark and coming back to her again.

Sango noticed his stirrings beneath her. They were hard to ignore, pulsing against her center. She wanted him, all of him, and she found herself moving her hips involuntarily into his touch, into him. The world stilled as the sun began its early morning climb, making the sky purple on top and orange on the bottom, throwing shadows over Sango’s floor and Lord Sesshomaru’s face. There was no sound but her labored breaths and the songbirds. She thought, suddenly, that Rin or Kohaku might walk in on them, looking for their teacher.

“Ah— Hurry,” she said, and it was so quiet, and she didn’t even register that she had said it at all. “Hurry, before they come to find me.” She hoped he would sense her urgency, but he continued his pace, an aching, leisure pace that made Sango whine. “Please,” she said. 

Sesshomaru shook his head. “No.”

“My Lord,” she whimpered. She felt near tears. His touch had faded to feathers, and she bore down on him, chasing friction and finding none. 

“I want to take my time.”

The words fluttered in her chest, but Sango was beyond taking time. He was mistaken if he meant to have her endure him for longer than she already had. Sango rose up on her shins, a small gap, a miniscule amount of distance between his hand and her, and then sunk back into him. Her pelvis hit his hard, hard enough to elicit pain if he were a human. She dragged herself over his length, through fabric, weighing herself down, and Sesshomaru’s claws arched outward enough to dig half moons into the flesh of her thighs. He twisted his head back, growling, the whites of his eyes flickering with red. 

“That is not wise,” he said. Sango’s thighs were burning where his claws sunk in. She wiggled over him, nestling him in her center. “That is not wise,” he repeated. 

A wild thought came to Sango then. None of this was wise. Any of it. The sun was high enough now to touch Sango’s shoulders, which were still clothed, and in a moment Kohaku or Rin would find her here, with Lord Sesshomaru, her cheeks flushed and her sleepwear shoved up to her belly button. 

Sango didn’t give Lord Sesshomaru time to protest. If provoking him was unwise, then she would provoke further, having never been one to fear demons anyway. She would get what she wanted. 

Sango kept her sights on the young demon lord as she took him from his _hakama_. 

He was larger than she had anticipated. She sucked in a breath and fitted him between her legs, grinding over him, dragging herself down his length. The feeling of his claws on her had reached a fever pitch, and her eyes were watering from the pain and pleasure both, but she moved against his grip with such assurance that he had no choice but to let up and hold her at the waist instead, coming forward onto his elbows. 

His body could swallow hers two times over. It was hard to tell how big Lord Sesshomaru was when they were standing feet apart. Sango tended to look up at him, and he looked down at her, but taking him in, breathing him in, she felt immeasurably breakable in his hands. 

“Ah—” he said, mirroring Sango’s gasp from earlier. He was guiding her now, attempting to set his own rhythm. It was faster than before, leagues more impatient, and Sango felt a thrill to have been the one to render Lord Sesshomaru to her will. A human’s will. 

Sango braced herself on his shoulders, folding her body over his. She whined into his neck, covering the noises there, hoping no one would hear them but knowing someone must. Lord Sesshomaru was grunting too loud to be appropriate for the early morning. 

“My Lord—” she started and stopped. Lord Sesshomaru had begun working her again, this time in faster, frenzied circles. He wrenched her sleepwear down over her shoulders with his free hand and bit her over her swath of unblemished skin.

“That was not wise,” he said in her ear. Gooseflesh erupted over Sango’s skin despite the heat. He maintained their pace as he spoke. “You ought to know better than to provoke a demon, slayer.”

She was not herself. That was the excuse she allotted to herself at this moment. Miroku would agree if he could see her now. He would say, “My dear Sango, it is quite unfair of you to hold back on me.” The decision wasn’t conscious, she would tell him, it was born of this coupling, specifically. The longer Sango rested in this demon lord’s lap, the longer she understood that she was always being led here, to him, to this moment. Miroku was a checkpoint and Sesshomaru was the destination. 

She drove out all thoughts of Rin and the incident that caused Sango and Lord Sesshomaru’s formal meeting. She shut her mind off to the dregs of guilt. 

“Are you ready?” Lord Sesshomaru’s teeth glanced over Sango’s throat. He was neither perturbed by the events which sparked this particular flame nor thinking of guilt, or conscience. He held Sango firmly in his arms. Grounded. 

Sango shivered. “Yes, my Lord.”

It was difficult to keep quiet as he entered her, holding himself and guiding her hips down. She put all her weight on him now, tucking her knees into his sides, filling up with the length of him. He planted his thumbs in the creases where her thighs met her hips and began rocking her himself, before she was ready, while she was still grappling with him. “Lord Sesshomaru,” she said, meaning to warn him of how the movement would send her into a spiral. The words died on her lips as he brought them both toppling sideways, forcing Sango onto her back. 

The morning was warming the grass along the walls of Sango’s house, making everything yellow. The autumn flowers wafted in with the breeze, perfume-scented, and Sango’s head went dizzy.

Lord Sesshomaru kissed her again, ramming his mouth into hers, using his teeth to bite his way in. Sango welcomed him. Wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close, closer still. Strange noises were coming from deep in his chest, scratching their way out of his throat and into her mouth, rumbling from his chest to hers. He stole her lip between his teeth and she gasped with the wind, reaching a hand down between them to help herself along. Lord Sesshomaru wrenched her arm away, pinning it above her head. 

Sango was going to lose herself in this man. Madness was already a friend in the corners of her vision, beckoning her to do obscene things. To say things. To promise things to this demon lord who she owed so much. 

He sucked on her neck, said: “Keep it there.” The words tumbled out of him. 

She opened her mouth to retort, to do something the madness was telling her to do, when Sesshomaru slipped his own hand between them and brought her, gloriously, to her end in a few purposeful strokes. She muffled her noises by clenching her teeth, her body twitching, her mind emptying of everything but the way he was following her down with his cock and his hand, his thrusts matching her orgasm beat-for-beat. 

Lord Sesshomaru picked his own pace again when Sango was finished, chest heaving. She felt courageous enough to bring his mouth to hers, to kiss him completely, brushing her fingertips over his cheeks and birthmarks, tracing him. He came on her inner thighs, his mouth migrating to her breast where he bit her to stifle his cry.

Sango washed herself on the strand of a river. Carrying a bucket of water from knee-high shallows to the pebbly shore, she used a small square cloth to wipe the sweat and the sex from her skin. When she turned her head she saw the white land of her shoulder, plotted with red pin pricks from Lord Sesshomaru’s teeth. Their centers had started purpling already, the blood beneath pooling at the surface. 

Sesshomaru had insisted that he would leave. Sango helped him into his _hankimono_ and attempted to convince him to see Lady Kaede. He told her, not unkindly, that he would heal without help from a holy woman.

He planned to take her somewhere new when the weather turned. Different scenery, he said, and bent to place a kiss to the grooves in her knuckles. Everything was wet and spiked with heat. His long white hair was plastered to his neck, damp from pain and pleasure both. Sango wanted to hug him goodbye but something about that seemed too intimate so she let him kiss her knuckles, thinking of the weight of him on her body. 

Sango found Inuyasha leaning under a sugar maple as she ascended the hill back to the village. He opened one eye to her as she passed and took the bucket from her hands.

“He didn’t stay the night,” said Inuyasha. 

“No,” Sango replied.

“I smelled the blood. What happened to him?”

“He didn’t say.”

Quiet. Oppressive, almost, like she was enduring her friend’s company and not simply being in it. Like Inuyasha had no right to question Sango for fucking his brother, a man he tried to kill and who had tried to kill him too. 

“And you laid with him?” he said. 

There was no use in lying to Inuyasha. 

“Yes,” she said.

They reached her house. He left the bucket in the _genkan_. 

“Please don’t tell the others.” Sango said. She wrapped his hand in hers and thought, oh, the heat was all Sesshomaru. 

“It’s really none of my business anyway,” said Inuyasha. 

**

They ate marshmallows by the fire that evening. Kagome carried bags of them over her shoulders, promising not to leave the clear thin plastic behind in their era and to instead take it home to hers. She took her teeth to one bag and ripped it open, dispelling marshmallows into her lap. One got caught between Inuyasha’s fingers and he pushed in, nail biting into the softness, and held it up to the sky like he wished to see the stars through it, then stuffed it between his molars. 

Kagome stuck her marshmallows on a stick. She let them catch fire and char and boil before she blew hot air to cool them off. Their insides exploded onto Kagome’s hands as she plucked them from her stick, gumming up her nails with pure white. She hummed and _oooooh_ ’d and told them how Westerners ate something called s’mores and that was where she got the idea from. “I’ve seen some Western movies,” she said, licking the marshmallow from her lips. They shared sake out of red porcelain flasks and Kagome left a ring of marshmallow guts around the perimeter of her _choko_. “I thought this could be fun.”

Kohaku and Rin broke their marshmallows into quarter pieces and took turns sticking them to each other’s faces. Twice Rin got marshmallow in her hair and smeared it over Kohaku’s cheeks. Reparations, she said. Kohaku was a painted doll by the time he was finished with the evening, his lips red in contrast with the creamy white reflection of the firelight glow. Embers danced between branches of wood at their feet. Sango wiggled her toes and Inuyasha was looking at her, sake in hand, red _choko_ blaring in her peripheral. 

Miroku laughed at something Lady Kaede said and his hand went nonchalantly to the small of Sango’s back. She sat up straighter, attempted to pull her body away from his touch. 

Sango fed herself marshmallows and let sake burst over her taste buds and brushed her fingers through Rin’s hair and closed her eyes to the cacophony of people, to the discussions between her own mind and the crackling fire.

It would make no sense to think of Sesshomaru now. 

What would it mean to think of him now?

Rin held Sango’s hand and patted it. Her small thumb brushed the place where Sesshomaru had set his goodbye kiss that morning. 

“He came to see you last night, didn’t he?” Rin cupped her hand and talked into Sango’s ear. Gooey marshmallow bumped from Rin’s nose into Sango’s temple. “I think he might be falling in love with you, Lady Sango.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments & kudos, pretty please <3


End file.
